In current video conferencing systems the local video is streamed directly from the local camera to the local display (see FIG. 1). With the current technology, the local video is always shown in great quality. In contrast, the video from the remote location often appears with many artifacts. The remote video quality degradation is due to network artifacts such as packet lost, congestion, delay, jitter, or inadequate computation processing resources such slow CPU, shortage of memory, etc.
Since the local video is always shown in great quality independent of network conditions, the local party may actually think that the remote party can see him/her/them clearly when in fact the remote party might see him/her/them with heavy video/audio distortion or the remote party might not see the local party at all. This often forces the remote party to ask the local party to repeat himself, herself or themselves, results in miscommunication or leads to irritating situations. A remote party may not be able to ask the local party to repeat himself, herself or themselves until the network condition improves. Network conditions may not improve until several minutes later during the videoconferencing, which is highly disruptive to the conversation. Sometimes the remote party may not even know that they missed something, for example, the local party may smile at the remote party, and this smile may be lost or distorted due to network conditions. Such conditions are extremely hurtful to the conversation, where bad video is often worse than no video at all.
Some systems include feedback mechanisms such as a symbol (e.g. a bright yellow lighting mark) or text messages on the remote video's display in case the network condition is poor. Unfortunately, such feedback mechanisms still make it difficult for a local party to learn the meaning of symbols or text messages since it does not capture the actual video degradation. Furthermore, symbols or text do not capture the varying degree of network degradation of video quality. It would therefore be considered an advance in the art to develop new systems and methods whereby the local party actually sees how he/she/them is/are viewed on a remote video display during a videoconference in a continuous manner. Such a continuous feedback system would allow the party to continuously adjust and adapt to how he/she/them is/are seen to maximize communication effectiveness; e.g. delay smiling until after a network congestion has passed.